Missing coed's parents mark 3 years since disappearance

Robert and Charlene Spierer of Edgemont, N.Y., still seek answers about the disappearance of their daughter Lauren. They were in Bloomington, Ind., in April 2012 looking for clues about Lauren, who went missing June 3, 2011.(Photo: Robert Scheer, The Indianapolis Star)

The parents of a missing Indiana University student sat in stunned silence in December when a lawyer uttered those words in an Indiana courtroom in defense of a young man they hold partly responsible for their daughter's disappearance.

That moment that continues to haunt the Edgemont, N.Y., couple — Lauren Spierer's pre-dawn disappearance on June 3, 2011 — was characterized by the attorney as almost a whim.

"There are only two facts: A young woman got pretty intoxicated and she just walked away, and they can't make that into something it's not," lawyer Greg Garrison told the judge, arguing, successfully, that his client Mike Beth be dismissed as a defendant in Robert and Charlene Spierer's wrongful death lawsuit. "She just walked away."

"It was said with an arrogance and a certainty that was very troubling to us," Robert Spierer told The (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News during a recent interview in White Plains, N.Y.

"I just have that tattoed on my brain; 'She just walked away, she just walked away,' " said Charlene Spierer, disdainfully parroting the lawyer. "He was very flippant about it. I just wanted to say, 'Just prove that she just walked away.' "

The Spierers, who will mark the third anniversary since their daughter's disappearance Tuesday, continue to suspect Beth and two friends had something to do with it, and that the 20-year-old Indiana University student may never have left their townhouse complex alive after she arrived there, unsteady and with bruising to her face, after a night of heavy partying.

Having been frustrated by the lack of progress by police and their own private investigators, Spierer's parents are using the lawsuit to try to force more information from the two remaining defendants, Jay Rosenbaum and Corey Rossman. They believe the men, who have long since left Bloomington, Ind., and are pursuing careers out of state, are still withholding information about their time with Spierer in the hours leading to her disappearance.

Lawyers for Rosenbaum and Rossman maintain Spierer left the housing complex on her own and that the young men bare no responsibility.

The lack of answers has left the Spierers trapped in time. They accept that their daughter is dead but are unwilling to move on. Her room remains as it was the last time she visited.

"It seems like this just happened, like it was just this past June," Charlene Spierer said. "I still have Lauren's text messages on my phone, her voice messages. It's almost like we're still waiting."

"You just get kind of crazy about things," she added, noting that she gets choked up when she encounters people and places that remind her of Lauren.

Lauren Spierer has been missing since June 3, 2011. She was last seen in Bloomington, Ind.(Photo: Handout photo via The Indianapolis Star)

She and her husband also tense up when they receive phone calls from each other.

"Every time Robbie calls me, even after all this time, I think he's calling me about Lauren," she said, tearfully.

"I feel the same way," Robert Spierer said, "that one of those calls from you is going to be a call where you're going to be saying they found Lauren."

Yet this year for the first time since their daughter's disappearance, they've been trying to figure out how to move on with their lives, trying to convince themselves that it's OK to pursue happiness with her missing.

For instance, they're making efforts to spend more quality time with their older daughter, Rebecca, a social worker who this past year moved with her husband to Massachusetts.

"Rebecca said to me that she dreams about Lauren all the time," Charlene Spierer said. "We're trying not to just be completely focused on Lauren. Because (Rebecca) is young, she has a whole future ahead of her. Hopefully there's going to be a lot of happy things that are going to be happening for her."

"The passage of time doesn't blunt the memories," Robert Spierer said. "What it helps you to do is to find other meaningful things in your life, try to bring back things that haven't been there for the past three years. It takes a while to get to that place where you feel like you can start looking forward instead of continuously looking backward.

"We're letting ourselves do things that other people do," he added. "We talked about planning a vacation."

"But we can't," Charlene Spierer said. "We can't really plan because we need to be here. We're kind of dictated now by this suit that we're pursuing. If there is a court date, if there's an interview, we need to be there."

They filed the lawsuit days before the second anniversary. Since then, they've maintained a low profile, not wanting to jeopardize the case by commenting about the young men they've strongly criticized in the past.

It has required restraint and extreme patience. Over the course of a year, the Spierers haven't gotten to the point when their lawyer can depose the defendants and grill them about the disappearance. A trial, if it happens, won't take place until May 2015 at the earliest.

"The process is painstakingly slow, and fraught with filings and appeals and refilings, just an endless series of legal maneuverings and delays," Robert Spierer said.

"You get very disheartened," Charlene Spierer said. "But what are our other options? We really can't do anything as far as the investigation. So we really don't have a choice. It's very emotional. But we're not going to give up on Lauren."